LeakBird

(Jan. 19, 2009, EcoLocalizer)

It feels like you can’t check the news lately without hearing about another area coping with severe drought. Here in Atlanta, we’ve been dealing with a water shortage for years, as have folks in California.
Texas is in a worsening drought situation, too, which is leading to cattle deaths. There’s no grass [...]

(Jan. 16, 2009, Reuters)
Nearly 2 billion people in Asia, from coastal city dwellers to yak-herding nomads, will begin suffering water shortages in coming decades as global warming shrinks glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, experts said.
The plateau has more than 45,000 glaciers that build up during the snowy season and then drain to the major rivers [...]

(Jan. 10, 2009, News 8 Austin)
Nothing beats a free ride, or seat, for that matter. That’s because the City of Austin is giving away vouchers for new high efficiency toilets to replace your old wasteful ones.
With a record drought here in Central Texas, water conservation is on everyone’s mind. But how can you make [...]

(Dec. 12, 2008, AlterNet)
Lawmakers in Sacramento need to understand the role of water in California. An antiquated water system designed for 20 million inhabitants combined with global warming and a burgeoning population are three valid reasons why the legislator must act quickly and decisively.
Currently southern California is experiencing its worst drought since the inception of [...]

(Jan. 7, 2009, Houston Chronicle)
The state’s first attempt at purifying salty seawater sucked from the Gulf of Mexico yielded two lessons: adding the gulf to the state’s mix of water resources is technically feasible, but at least for now too expensive on a large scale.
Data gleaned from the 18-month pilot project on the Brownsville ship [...]

(Jan. 5, 2009, PhillyBurbs)
Each day Montgomery County residents and workers use as much water as the daily flow of the Perkiomen Creek.
Seventeen large public water suppliers (10 authorities, four privately owned companies and three municipal water departments) supply 254,000 domestic, commercial, industrial and institutional customers.
These customers use more than 152 million gallons of water each [...]

(Dec. 30, 2008, Denver Post)
Finances are tight for a lot of folks these days.
Unfortunately, money isn’t the only thing that’s lacking. There’s another type of shortage that threatens our quality of life.
Colorado needs more water. As things stand right now, the state will not have enough water for our population in the near future.
We’re not [...]

(Jan. 4, 2009, Greenville Online)
Two years ago, when wells started to run dry in southern Greenville County, state and county leaders sought ways to bring water to residents along an eight-mile stretch off U.S. 25.
State Rep. Eric Bedingfield and County Councilman Fred Payne have warned residents at numerous community meetings that $60,000 in state money [...]

(Dec. 29, 2008, Sustainable Industries)
Unlike the price of oil, another natural resource on which the global economy depends, the price of water does not value the water itself. Instead its price is determined by the cost of the infrastructure and transportation used to move water from one place to another. The average cost per 1,000 [...]

Via Nuprana.com

(Dec. 20, 2008, The Oregonian via OregonLive.com)
“With the population growth we’re expecting and the changes coming with climate change, we’ve got to put some serious thought into how we’re going to address water demands,” Bateman said. “Anyone in eastern Oregon and anybody who’s around in the summer knows water is not always available.“…
He said Oregonians [...]

(Dec. 29, 2008, NBC11News.com)
A small town north of Denver went without water for most of the weekend and it’s not clear why.
About 6,000 in the town of Milliken were left without water for about 10 hours over the weekend.
Public works director Mike Woodruff said the town lost 750 thousand to 1 million gallons of water [...]

(Monday, 2008, WaterCrunch)
Last year, over 50 percent of the southeast was in an extreme or exceptional drought. Thanks to recent rain, just 5 percent of the southeast was in an extreme or worse drought. The drought’s epicenter continues to be the upstate of South Carolina and western North Carolina. For the last six months, it expands [...]

(Dec. 26, 2008, The Los Angeles Times)
“Homes lack key amenity: water,” on Page A1 of today’s Los Angeles Times, details the low-/no-water- pressure woes of people who bought in the Lancaster development of Westview Estates.
Things only got worse as more homeowners moved into the gated community on the outskirts of Lancaster. Complaints to New Jersey-based [...]

(Dec. 16, 2008, The Los Angeles Times)
The cutbacks will vary depending on conditions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the smelt’s only home and a major source of water for the majority of Californians.

In a typical year, the smelt protections will slash California State Water Project deliveries 20% to 30% – essentially maintaining the level [...]

(Nov. 20, 2008, The Oroville Mercury Register)

“Durham is one of the areas that we have seen groundwater levels drop,” Gosselin said. “There is a lot of concern there … We also see issues in the (well-dependent) ridge area and around Chico — anywhere there is a heavy reliance on groundwater.”
For several years, the county has [...]

(Nov. 30, 2008, The San Francisco Chronicle)
At a time when people are deeply concerned about our dependence on imported oil, we should also be concerned about increasing our state’s dependence on imported food. In fact, our ability to feed our state could be seriously threatened by problems such as a long-term drought, the state’s aging [...]

(Oct. 30, 2008, The Associated Press)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California said Thursday that it plans to cut water deliveries to their second-lowest level ever next year, raising the prospect of rationing for cities and less planting by farmers.
The Department of Water Resources projects that it will deliver just 15 percent of the amount that local [...]

David Zetland recently wrote an article for Forbes magazine entitled, “The Water Shortage Myth“, which basically echoed the economistic idea that until water is no longer an undervalued scarcity, but rather priced accordingly, as in the case of crude oil, at perhaps 3x the current water prices across the US, public utilities will waste their [...]